Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight / Émilie Picard: Degrés Est

Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight brings together a selection of immersive installations by the American artist Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles). Rarely exhibited until now, they reveal how the artist seizes the evocative power of found objects. Highlighting Black identity and intersectional feminism within the broader context of West Coast history and experience in the United States, these installations offer visitors radical new worlds inspired by ritual and myth.

Rich with narrative, Saar’s installations are informed by the artist’s travels to Haiti, Mexico, and Nigeria during the 1970s. This exhibition highlights works that meditate on spirituality, referring to elements of voodoo culture, astrology, or palmistry. The installations in Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight evoke links between magic and technology, allude to the process of mourning, or the passage between life and death. While Saar’s intimately scaled assemblages of the 1960s and 1970s are icons of Black feminist art, audiences have rarely had the opportunity to encounter the artist’s monumental installations—many of which have only been recently rediscovered and are exhibited here for the first time in decades. The history of the African diaspora has inspired Saar to create a highly influential œuvre of dense and vibrant forms throughout a career that has spanned decades.

With Serious Moonlight, 49 Nord 6 Est continues its exploration of diasporic visual languages in order to question hegemonic Western canons and the narratives that underpin them.

The exhibition is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) in collaboration with 49 Nord 6 Est—Frac Lorraine, Metz and the Kunstmuseum Luzern. Curator: Stephanie Seidel, Curator, ICA Miami.

The exhibition at 49 Nord 6 Est is supported by Étant donnés—a programme of the Villa Albertine, FACE Foundation and the Ford Foundation, in partnership with the French Embassy of the United States, the French Ministry of Culture, the French Institute, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Chanel and the ADAGP.

A monographic catalogue is published by ICA Miami and DelMonico Books • D.A.P., with contributions by Sampada Aranke, Edwidge Danticat, Leah Ollman, and Stephanie Seidel. 

Degrés Est: Émilie Picard
Émilie Picard (b. 1984 Toulouse, lives and works in Strasbourg) is the ninth artist invited to use the forward-thinking space Degrés Est—here at the suggestion of Felizitas Diering, director of Frac Alsace. The painter presents an original and experimental installation, a stage within a larger ensemble.

Émilie Picard develops an ongoing situated practice of painting. The artist is interested in the image as a vestige, i.e. as a marker of time. Like an archaeologist, she collects found objects that she paints on a one to one scale; she assembles them with naturalistic elements drawn from ancient friezes, then alters their readability by removing material. For Degrés Est, Émilie Picard presents the result of a new experiment: a fresco created during the two weeks preceding the exhibition’s opening. The artist applies the process of decay to the image. Emilie Picard’s work speaks about processes of improvisation, invisibility and ruin; it embodies the strata that constitute the different landscapes we gaze at—whether they are real or virtual, figurative or abstract. Her paintings reveal these décors in all their otherness (in both senses of the word: a “diminution” but also a “relationship to the other”). These networks of lines form the cartography of a flourishing social landscape.

A limited edition of a “make your own”-type puzzle-book is produced on the occasion of the exhibition.
Curated by Agnès Violeau.

Director: Fanny Gonella
Curator (Émilie Picard): Agnès Violeau
Public program: Justine Jean
Communication: Lise Augustin

Events
Brave book club: September 13, 2022–January 10, 2023
The book club meets monthly for discussions on literature.

Subjective visits: October 5, 2022–January 18, 2023
Psychics and mediums offer a subjective tour of the exhibition.

Healers/therapists: what form of care to choose?: October 13, 7–8:30pm
Panel discussion: possible complementary care systems in the field of mental health.

Transplantation: November 19, 3–4:30pm
Reading featuring a selection of texts by French-speaking female Caribbean writers.

Techxodus: January 14 
Conference and Live set by rhythmanalyst and writer DeForrest Brown, Jr.